01 Three systems, not three typefaces
It is worth being precise about what we mean, because these are not three lettering styles: they are three distinct alphabets, with different character shapes, derived one from another in a chain. The first is Mrgvlovani, from which Nuskhuri came, and from that last one Mkhedruli derived, which is what is used today for everything.
What makes the case exceptional is not that three exist but that all three are still practised. The first two survive mainly in a restricted sphere, are taught informally and appear in inscriptions and specialised texts; the third is the one of the street, the school, the press and the keyboard.
02 What UNESCO inscribed
In December 2016 the intergovernmental committee meeting in Addis Ababa inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity an element with a very precise name: the living culture of the three writing systems of the Georgian alphabet.
The first two words are worth noticing. What was inscribed was not 'the Georgian alphabet', which would be an object; it was its living culture, that is, the practice of still writing and teaching them. It is the difference between protecting a typeface and protecting the people who draw it.
The letters were not protected. What was protected is that somebody still writes them by hand.
03 How the one you will see works
The everyday alphabet has thirty-three letters and two features that make it easy to start reading. The first: there are no upper and lower case. Every letter has a single form, so a proper noun and an ordinary word look exactly the same, and there are no two versions of anything to learn.
The second: the correspondence between letter and sound is almost perfect. Each sign always sounds the same, with no two-letter combinations for one sound and no silent letters. In practice that means that, with half an hour and a table, you can start sounding out signs even without understanding a word of what they say.
04 Why it deserves half an hour
Because it changes the trip out of all proportion to the effort. As soon as you recognise a few letters, signs stop being incomprehensible decoration and start being information: you tell a bakery from a pharmacy, you read the name of the stop and you identify a word repeated on every menu.
And because it is one of the living scripts least like any other. Its letters share no shapes with Latin, Cyrillic, Greek or Arabic: they are closed curves and long ascenders and descenders, with almost no straight lines. Looking at them attentively for half an hour is, quite simply, seeing a different way of having solved the same problem.
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